Materials: VIKA AMON Desktops, aluminum angle iron, good cider
Description: Open offices are awesome. Open offices are loud. Loud is often fun, but sometimes bad.
My company, Sharethrough, loves us an open office. We love the collaboration, the misused office supplies flying from desk to desk, and we love working together to make cool things.
But sometimes you need some quiet. We usually don't want or need quiet or isolation enough to move our desk into some corner, we just need a space to bang through some work in a quiet environment where we can spend an hour or a day away from the open office cacophony.
Enter the Quiet Desk. One of our founders suggested making some desks that were like study hall in college, with some visual division and quiet from the rest of the office. Not wanting to do a lot of shop-building, I decided to build as much of it as possible from off-the-shelf Ikea parts.
The build is pretty straightforward. The dividers are 59" x 29.5" VIKA AMON desktops in gloss white. there are three of them standing on edge between/on the end of the worksurfaces. I bought hammer-on furniture glides at my local hardware store to keep the edges of the dividers slightly off the floor.
The work surfaces are VIKA AMON 39.375" x 29.375" desktops in Black-Brown. They're joined to the dividers with 1" Aluminum angle Iron (also from the local hardware store) which has been cut to 29.25" in length to form a side bracket. This length lets both ends of the bracket connect to the blocking in the dividers, providing better support for the work surface. For added strength, I also epoxied the bracket to the dividers.
Finally, I added two additional VIKA AMON 39.375" x 29.375" desktops in plain white to the lower-backs of the desks. This will provide privacy if we ever take these away from the walls, but most importantly, they greatly strengthen the overall piece, guarding against side-to-side racking that we'd otherwise get. These were joined to the dividers using brackets made from the waste in cutting the work surface brackets from the original 48" lengths the aluminum came in.
All the assembly was done using 1" lath screws (nice wide heads, no need for washers), being really really careful not to overtighten them into the particleboard blocking in the VIKA desktops.
Finally, I wired and zip-tied a power adapter and a set of headphones into each desk, so you can take your laptop with you, and get your jam on. I used some leftover mounting posts from a SIGNUM cable management basket, together with a 5/8 fender washer to make a handy storage place for the 'phones.
It took about 45min and 1.5 Hornsby's Amber Ciders to cut and drill the brackets, then about 2hrs total to assemble all the bits.
Happy Quiet Place!
~ Troy, San Francisco, CA
